When was the last time you looked closely and attentively at a map and thought of it as an example of data visualization?

A love of maps and all the information they convey provided a new career for Alli Torban, a data visualization designer at the American Enterprise Institute and Data Viz Today.

Alli Torban

“I came at data visualization how most people come at data visualization, which is in a very roundabout way,” Torban said. She has a degree in math and moved to the Northern Virginia area to pursue a career working fora government contractor but put her career on the back burner when she had her first child.

She stopped working entirely after her second child was bor but when she decided she wanted to rejoin the work force, Torban didn’t want to go back to what she was doing before.

“I kept coming back to my love of maps,” she said. “I didn’t feel all that fulfilled doing software testing. … I discovered, well, I like maps, and that’s data visualization. There’s a lot of layering of data on maps. I started getting into data journalism.”

But without any formal journalism or data visualization training, Torban had to find a way to learn what she needed to learn while raising her children.

Here she took another unconventional turn: Torban began reaching out to the creators of data visualization pieces she saw and enjoyed and asked them questions about how they developed their pieces.

“I’d contact the author and ask a few questions, like what data they used, how they cleaned it, what their creative process looked like.They would tell me the information,” she said. “I compile that information into a story so I can tell my audience, bring them through the process.”

But why not take a visual concept and relay it on a visual media, like YouTube?

“I have heard that a lot,” Torban laughed. “I love listening to podcasts. I don’t have a lot of time sitting in front of the computer. I’m constantly cleaning up, getting snacks, making dinner. There are lots of things you’re doing when you’re busy following around little people who need a lot of attention. Listening to podcasts were my outlet, so I’m really sticking to podcasts for selfish reasons.”

Alli Torban , a data visualization designer and host of the Data Viz Today podcast, joins producer Michael O’Connell to explain how her love of maps changed her career and why podcasts made more sense than YouTube for exploring a very visual concept.

Most news outlets are driven by a need to break news, to be first on a story or to add some detail no one else has just yet.

The Correspondent, on the other hand, wants to introduce the United States to its model and philosophy of un-breaking the news.

A crowdfunded news site that relies solely on choose-what-you-pay contributions from its subscribers, The Correspondent launched in the Netherlands in 2013 after breaking world record and raising $1.7 million in 30 days.

Rob Wijnberg, co-founding editor of The Correspondent

“We’ve been growing steadily ever since, the fastest-growing ad-free journalism platform in Europe,” said Rob Wijnberg, a co-founding editor. “We wanted to start a daily antidote to the news grind.”

Now The Correspondent has more than 60,000 paying members and is looking to launch in the United States in 2019, if it can get the support it needs to start.

“The Correspondent will only be a reality if we reach our fundraising goal of $2.5 million by Dec. 14,” Wijnberg said. “If we don’t hit the goal, it won’t exist and the people who have contributed will get their money back. Once we hit our goal, we will build a team and we’ll launch in spring 2019.”

As of Nov. 28, The Correspondent has raised $1 million from nearly 15,000 people in 98 countries.

So how, exactly, is The Correspondent different?

It’s based on 10 founding principles, among them being mindful of supporters’ privacy, providing coverage that goes beyond standard headlines and re-think what it means to be “news.”

“It’s not going to be responding to current events you see everywhere,” he said.

Further, there will be wide and deep collaboration between journalists and members, something Wijnberg said is “integral. You see that in other media – Wikipedia is a famous example where readers work on articles, but you don’t see much of that in journalism yet.”

Another way The Correspondent is different: There’s a dedicated conversation editor “whose job is to get people to share expertise on topics we’re exploring. By actively inviting (readers and subscribers) to do this, the comment section we have is very different from what you’re used to on traditional sites.”

Rob Wijnberg, a co-founding editor of The Correspondent, explains to producer Michael O’Connell how a crowdfunded news outlet that cares more about diving deep than following the headlines is preparing to take on the United States after five years of success in Europe.

In the age of being accused of spreading “fake news” and being quick to defensiveness, Stephanie Lepp has a question.

Whose truth are journalists telling?

Stephanie Lepp, host of Reckonings

“We’re in this post-truth moment, journalists are grappling with accusations of fake news and being called the enemy of the people. Then there’s this question: How do we respond to this, how do we overcome this, how do we deal with this?” asked Lepp, an independent artist and host of the Reckonings podcast.

“In the mainstream media, there’s this knee-jerk reaction, pulling in the opposite direction,” she said. “’You’re accusing us of fake news, no, we stand for truth.’ But have journalists, have the mainstream media, really been telling everyone’s truth? Sure, we’ve been telling the truth, but who’s truth and how and for what purpose? Is the fact that we haven’t been telling everyone’s truth the reason we missed the (2016 presidential) election?”

One of her recent guests posited that truth, however it’s defined, is not enough.

“Truth should be a baseline,” she said. “All journalistic work should be true and fact-checked and there are still questions.”

Take the current administration, for example. Had the mainstream media set up camp in central Ohio during the 2016 campaign cycle, “there was nothing miss-able about Donald Trump’s rise to power” from that perspective, Lepp said. “But the national media isn’t in central Ohio. Had you asked a lot of people in a lot of places that the national media isn’t necessarily covering at all, it wouldn’t have been surprising. There’s a rising tide of white supremacy coming for our national politics. It didn’t have to be surprising.”

Journalists are dedicated to telling the truth, but whose? Stephanie Lepp, an independent artist and host of the Reckonings podcast, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the difference between telling the truth and telling a broader, varied truth and why one truth won’t cover the whole story.

Reporters need to be good listeners. It’s a top job requirement: how can we tell good stories if we’re not listening closely to the people we interview?

But are reporters hearing everything that’s being said? And if so, what do they do with that information?

Cole Goins

“We’re not good at expanding our field of listening and incorporating deeper tactics to really understand the information needs of our communities in a way that drives the strategy of what we cover, how we cover it and how we get that information out,” said Cole Goins, a journalist, facilitator and media consultant with the American Press Institute. “We do listen a lot but I don’t think we embed that into our strategy as deeply as we could.”

Journalism has long been a one-sided form of communication, with reporters determining what pieces of information to use based solely on their judgment. But in a time of diminished trust and accusations of making stuff up, taking into consideration what readers want to know about and what their concerns are could help address those issues while building trust and increasing transparency, he said.

“We’re talking about, with a deeper emphasis on listening, getting away from more extractive and more to a transactional nature, so we’re being more responsive to what people want to know and how we can think about journalism as more like a service,” Goins said.

This would require more interaction with readers, listeners, viewers, etc., but simply adding a monthly open house or roundtable discussion won’t cut it. Go to where your audience, your community, your readers are already gathering and join them there. Make the extra effort to meet them on their terms to help meet your goals, Goins suggested.

It’s an opportunity for the community to share their feedback, questions and suggestions, along with complaints and concerns, with reporters that can foster better relationships and, in turn, provide better coverage and improved trust, just by hearing readers’ thoughts.

It’s the age-old question: We listen, but how well do we hear? Cole Goins, a journalist, facilitator and media consultant with the American Press Institute, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss how expanding and deepening listening practices can help journalists build trust and improve their coverage in communities that are questioning the processes reporters use to tell their stories.

For a brief time, Charlie Specht left journalism. He took a job in politics, as many journalists do, after working at the Buffalo News.

When the movie “Spotlight” came out, the urge to return to journalism hit him hard. But not even he could’ve guessed that the story behind that movie — a team of journalists uncovering decades of sexual abuse of children by priests in Boston — would be waiting for him when he returned to the newsroom.

Specht is an investigative reporter for WKBW, the ABC affiliate in Buffalo. Since March, he’s been reporting, in three 9-minute packages on broadcast news and a handful of smaller pieces, what appears to be a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse of children and young men by priests in the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo.

Charlie Specht

“This is a rare investigative story that we didn’t preplan things, we didn’t drop a big story to get things going,” Specht said. “This is a story that every reporter in town was working on. Michael Whalen, a regular boy from South Buffalo, had a press conference in March in front of the Diocese of Buffalo and said ‘I was sexually assaulted by a parish priest in the 1980s.’ He wanted to tell his story. It was a very simple, heartfelt story. It looked to be a one-off, if you will, a story that might last a couple days.”

That night, a reporter with the Buffalo News went to the home of Father Norbert Orsolits, the priest Whalen said abused him, and the priest admitted yes, he had abused dozens of boys over the course of decades.

Specht has worked to get in touch with victims and whistleblowers and tell their stories. He’s doing this in a town that still has deep Catholic roots and deep Irish roots, much like Boston, and a city where the 60,000 Catholics were told by previous bishops that the abuse problem in Boston didn’t exist in Buffalo.

“Whistleblowers within the church contacted us to say this isn’t a thing of the past, this is still going on,” Specht said. “They felt morally compelled to come forward. They felt like things were still being obscured from the public.”

He and his team started with the list of 42 priests published by the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo in March that the diocese admitted had been accused of sexual abuse. They looked at where those priests had been reassigned, but even as that process started, victims were calling Specht angry – their abuser was not included on the list. According to Specht’s reporting and the documents provided to him by whistleblowers, the number is in excess of 100.

The Catholic Diocese of Buffalo had been willing to talk to reporters at first but Bishop Richard Malone hasn’t answered questions in months. He’s also refusing to step down from his position.

“The response to the public, according to parishioners, has been anything but transparent,” Specht said.

On Thursday, Oct. 25, one of Specht’s whistleblower sources, Siobhan O’Connor, came forward. Previously the bishop’s secretary, she was a featured interviewed on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, Oct. 28, in a piece about the priest abuse scandal in Buffalo, along with the first member of the clergy in Buffalo to call on the bishop to resign. Specht said he’s got at least two more big stories in the works. “There’s no end in sight on this story,” he says.

People across the country were losing their homes in the blink of an eye. The stock market was crashing in ways not seen for decades. Lenders and big banks were going out of business every day.

The leadership at The Penny Hoarder, a consumer-facing publication that provides financial news and advice for everyday investors, had asked its staff to take on a big project, something that would involve multiple departments and would be bigger than “a 5-minute video or a 2,500 word story,” said Lisa Rowan, a senior writer and on-air analyst with the publication.

One of the other writers, Desiree Stennett, grew up in the Miami area and, with the Miami-Dade region being amongs the hardest hit in the country when the subprime mortgage crisis occurred, suggested looking back on the market collapse and reaching out to people who’d lost their homes.

“She had a lot of questions that weren’t being answered,” Rowan said. As the U.S. economy appears to have rebounded and most people are believed to be doing better now than they were 10 years ago, Stennett “was curious as to whether it would be true if we walked to people hit hardest 10 years ago. That was the idea that struck people the most.”

To start digging, the magazine began by reaching out to readers.

“We put a call in our email newsletter for people to fill out a simple Google form and tell us, did you lose your home, how are you doing now, what was your experience,” Rowan said. “We got more than 50 responses from people who told us about their experiences. They were so open with us.”

Alex Mahadevan (Chris Zuppa/The Penny Hoarder)

Alex Mahadevan, a data journalist with The Penny Hoarder, started down a different avenue.

“I downloaded every single census track in the U.S. and property values to look at neighborhoods, as specific as I could get, that had the biggest run-up before the housing burst and the biggest decline after,” he said. “There was a neighborhood in Lee County (Florida), LeHigh Acres, that ended up being far and away the neighborhood hit the hardest. It was basically half-built. I started looking at property records to see if I could find a source and found a real estate agent who bought up several homes in this neighborhood. He saw his real estate sign on the national news.”

Mahadevan had worked near Lee County prior to joining The Penny Hoarder and remembered the name of the county clerk. Another call there revealed the clerk was named in The Wall Street Journal due to the high rate of foreclosures in the county.

As they reached out to readers who were willing to speak about that dark time in their lives, many of them felt just as raw as they did 10 years ago, Rowan said.

“When you look back at something 10 years ago, it’s easy to look at the numbers and the black and white of it, but there’s so much gray in the middle of it, of what happened to real people, even how they were affected in the years after,” she said. “Bringing back some of those feelings of anxiety that were present at the time — we felt lucky we could do that but we felt grateful people were willing to revisit that time in their lives with such clarity and openness.”

Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since the housing bubble burst, sending the stock market into a tailspin. Lisa Rowan, a senior writer and on-air analyst with The Penny Hoarder, and Alex Mahadevan, a data journalist at The Penny Hoarder, discuss their publication’s major project The American Nightmare: 10 Years Later with producer Michael O’Connell, detailing how readers were willing to open up about a dark time in their lives and what they’ve found has changed in the years following.

After so many years of talking about the impending and inevitable onset of digital newsrooms, it’s finally starting to happen.

And it’s largely due to metrics and subscriptions.

Gwen Vargo, director of reader revenue at the American Press Institute

Newsrooms are learning that they can’t rely on traditional streams of revenue to keep the lights on. In order to do that, they need to understand what their readers, viewers or users are interested in, which types of reporting get the most attention and drive the most engagement and traffic. The best way to find that out, and in turn keep them coming back, is to look at metrics.

Those same metrics can back up a reporter’s story suggestions or lead them in new directions, further driving engagement and traffic and, after a while, leading to more subscriptions.

Newsrooms “have to be sustainable by getting more revenue with readers. That aligns really well with a newsroom,” she said. “If you’re generating content that’s valuable with the reader (and they’re willing to) pay for, that aligns better journalistically than chasing headlines for clicks. Even though it’s a shift, it should be a comfortable shift. Newsrooms are able to embrace it a little easier because it’s based on producing really high-quality content, away from that kind of volume/subscription funnel.”

Furthermore, people are really comfortable with the idea of a subscription-based service, she said. Look at how many people subscribe to Netflix for movies and TV shows, or Spotify for music, or the number of monthly or weekly box-based services, from clothing to prepared meals.

“I think the subscription mindset is more ingrained now than it has been,” Vargo said. “People are more comfortable with it as a concept. As more people are paying for news, it props it up. If a bunch of people are putting up paywalls, it becomes more normalized, something that is accepted and expected.”

API is set to relaunch its Metrics for News information service in October and has published research on the paths readers take before paying for a subscription to a news outlet. “More than 70 percent of people who subscribe read (an outlet) for a few months” before buying in, she said. “More than half were a year. That’s shocking to me that it was so long.”

API’s research also indicates people are subscribing to websites via social media platforms, something considered absurd just a few years ago.

Gwen Vargo, director of reader revenue with the American Press Institute, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss the finer points of how to get readers to first click on the articles reporters spend so much time creating, and then to take it a step further and get them to subscribe.

As a girl growing up in the D.C. area, Xanthe Scharff learned early on the importance of writing, of taking every day experiences and putting them to paper.

Her parents, both psychoanalysts, said it was important to find time every day to write down what they’d done so someone else could learn from it.

Scharff is co-founder and executive director of the Fuller Project for International Reporting, a nonprofit organization working to increase women’s representation in media, both in the newsroom and in coverage.

Xanthe Scharff is the U.S.Bureau chief of the Fuller Project for International Reporting

She previously spent a decade in Malawi, first writing about families living on $1 per day, covering their financial decisions and the way they would prioritize their sons’ educations over their daughters’. After her first piece, published in the Christian Science Monitor, one family’s daughter was forced to leave school in eighth grade, while her brother continued on. Readers were so moved by the girl’s story they sent in donations, wanting to help allow girls to keep going to school and ease the burden on their parents.

“I went back to the village and found a way to set up management and identify all the girls in the village who hadn’t made it past eighth grade,” Scharff said. “None of the girls had gotten past that. That was a way to set up a group of girls ready to go on and most needing of help.” She continued to report on the girls for a year and readers continued to respond, sending in donations totaling $40,000.

After a year, she knew she could no longer report on the girls and their education, so she stopped writing about them and, instead, created AGE Africa. “I worked on that for a decade until I moved abroad. … It’s still going, serving thousands of girls in Malawi. That idea that journalism can have impact is incredibly personal to me.”

It was that effort that led Scharff to dedicate more of her life to girls’ education. “I was shocked by the way that a family where the woman was the financial head of the household would deprioritize girls,” she said. Further, when she’d sit and talk with girls about their experiences, they routinely shared similar stories about the abuse they suffered from teachers, but they did so very casually.

She started the Fuller Project with Christina Asquith, who wrote about book about the role and importance the rights of women played in international situations, from the U.S. invasion of Iraq and beyond. Both had reported on issues about women, education and policy and knew that when women step up, everyone benefits and societies become stronger.

Xanthe Scharff, co-founder and executive director of the Fuller Project for International Reporting, joins producer Michael O’Connell to discuss her belief that writing every day and sharing stories can help change lives for girls and women around the world.

Robert Delaney, author of the upcoming novel The Wounded Muse, fell into his career as a journalist and writer.

He also fell into his specialty.

He can, in part, thank his kung fu instructor.

“When I was going to university, I wound up in the school of communications and thought, sure, journalism, that’s fine,” said Delaney, the U.S. bureau chief for the South China Morning Post. “I didn’t have an aptitude for math or science and figured what the hell.”

Robert F. Delaney

He was studying at Temple University and, at the same time, taking kung fu lessons. As part of an independent study project, he looked into the history and world of martial arts in America. He was also studying Mandarin.

“My adviser asked me to make sure I understood the foundation and philosophical underpinnings of kung fu, which took me to China,” he said. “I started learning about the country. At the time, I wasn’t expecting to go to China, but eventually the grand master at the studio asked if I was interested in going. That’s how I ended up in China.”

Delaney first landed in China in 1992, spending a year in a “third-tier city where there weren’t any English-language speakers other than missionaries.” Needless to say, it put quite a damper on his personal and social life.

Eventually, he landed a job with Dow Jones when the wire service was looking for an American or foreigner with journalism experience who could also speak Mandarin. Financial reporting was almost as foreign a concept as living full time in China. He was sent for a time to Singapore to learn how to cover rubber markets, learning the language of trade and commerce and futures.

“It wasn’t my natural comfortable place to be, writing about finance or futures,” Delaney said. “But what made it easy was no one else was covering futures for a western market. On the one hand, it was odd for me to be covering something I wasn’t inclined to look at closely, but because there was so much interest. We’re getting into the mid-‘90s. That’s when China’s economy started to take off. Whatever I was writing seemed to do OK.”

His lack of familiarity in the world of watching and learning trade and futures markets gave him a kind of advantage in a round-about way, and it also helped that he wasn’t a native Mandarin speaker, though he was getting better all the time. He’d ask a question of an expert, let them talk for several minutes, then ask his interview to summarize what they just said.

“After listening to so many explanations, my listening ability improved a lot,” he said.

Still, he didn’t really believe himself a journalist.

“I saw myself as more someone who was playing the part of a journalist. Because it was my first job, I figured this was what I needed to do,” Delaney said. “It took me a while to fall into the understanding that, yes, I was a journalist. Even though I was covering odd things, I gradually realized it was, in fact, the work of a journalist.”

Robert Delaney, the U.S. bureau chief for the South China Morning Post, tells producer Michael O’Connell about his unusual career path, from kung fu student to futures reporter covering the market in China. He also talks about writing his first novel, The Wounded Muse, which will be released in October.

It was a rare chance to apologize and take responsibility for past sins, when the paper was complicit in the lynching deaths of thousands of men and women.

Bro Krift, the paper’s executive editor, and Brian Lyman, its state government and politics reporter, published a series of articles and an editorial to apologize for the paper’s “callous indifference” toward the practice of lynching and the casual shrug it gave to the people who died.

Bro Krift and Brian Lyman

“I read through 20 years of stories and editorials on this stuff and there was always as sense of, yes, lynching is bad but we don’t want to do anything about it,” Lyman said. “If you look ahead to the paper’s coverage of the Montgomery bus boycott, it was amused cynicism, which was wholly inappropriate. When they had the Selma to Montgomery march, there was hostility directed toward the protesters. This paper didn’t wrap itself in glory when it came to covering these events right through the civil rights era.”

The opening of the memorial felt significant, not just for Montgomery and the county in which it was built, but for the south as a whole, especially in a changing world.

In the memorial, “you’re supposed to look at the past and understand where you came from and reconcile with those issues,” Krift said. “I didn’t exist in the 1860s, but the paper did. We were very much a part of it. If we were going to be asked that (question) within the memorial and museum, it only made sense for us to write the article that looked at our position, that looked at who we were as a paper and reflect on it and take responsibility for what occurred and how we proliferated the idea of white supremacy.”

In his research, Lyman was particularly haunted by the story of Robin White, a man lynched at the age of 27 in one of the few cases where white men were tried and convicted for his death, although all but one were later pardoned.

“When you’re reading through these lynching stories and confronting the transcripts, when you hear the lynchers’ words, they’re not even viewing their victims as human, they’re not expressing any regret for what they did,” Lyman said. “Robin White exists in the 1900 census and a few court records. There’s so much we don’t know, it screams to learn more. He was 27. He was married. He had a brother. His father, who was born into slavery, was still alive at the time he was murdered.”

When the museum opened, volunteers carried empty jars with the name of a person who’d been lynched written on the label. The jars were to be filled with soil from the county in which they were killed. One woman told Lyman she didn’t know anything about the man whose jar she was filling but she felt like his tombstone.

“That’s kind of how I feel about Robin White,” Lyman said.

It’s All Journalism producers Michael O’Connell and Amelia Brust talk to Bro Krift and Brian Lyman of the Montgomery Advertiser. Inspired by the opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice earlier this year, the newspaper examined its role in perpetuating racism and racial segregation during the Jim Crow era.

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